


38 Years

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 1000-3000 words, Crack, Episode Re-Write, Episode Related, F/F, F/M, Flash Fic, Humor, M/M, Meta, Multi, Satire, Season/Series 10, Team, Timed Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-23
Updated: 2007-06-23
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:30:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A crackfic alternative to 'Unending.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	38 Years

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 38 minutes into an LJ update.bml window for the Keep the Gate Open challenge. One cri de coeur from the original post preserved.

SG-1 stood at the foot of the gateramp with General O'Neill.

"So let me get this straight," O'Neill said for the benefit of the audience just tuning in, although in reality he would never summarize what they all already knew, much less speak in an expository lump. "The Asgard just up and left this dimension completely because they realized that some wonkiness in the fabric of the subspace continuum here was interfering with their genetic ... stuff, and that's why they were dying. And Thor didn't even say goodbye to _me_! But they made us a fleet of ships, each one loaded with their entire knowledge base and every scrap of way-cool technology, so that we can still have a magical solution to all our problems even though they're all gone and they can't swoop in to help us anymore when they're not unavailable for some contrived reason. Right so far?"

"Right so far," Daniel said, because there had to be a break in the expository lumpage somewhere.

"But instead of _sending this fleet to us right here_, where we, you know, _are_, they sent it to another star system and then messaged us the gate address. _Why_ did they do that again?"

"Because the writer needed us to go through the gate one last time and couldn't wait for a regularly scheduled mission, sir," Carter said.

"Ah," O'Neill replied.

"And because we will undoubtedly fall into some dire peril on the way to our destination," Vala added.

"Or there wouldn't be a story," Mitchell added to Vala's addition.

"Teal'c?" O'Neill said. "Nothing to add?"

"Indeed not," Teal'c said, "and I believe that General Landry is becoming anxious to wish us godspeed, as it is his only line, and he has been nervously practicing it in front of the mirror in the Level 22 men's room for several days."

"There is no men's room on Level 22," Carter said.

"And you would know this because ... ?" O'Neill said.

"Because the writer has no idea what's on Level 22 and doesn't have time to check the Wiki and wants to hang a lantern on it," Carter said.

"Ah," O'Neill replied. "Well, it's time to get this show on the road, kids." He turned and looked up at the control room. "Hank?"

Landry gripped Harriman's shoulder hard for support, ignoring Harriman's pathetic wince, and took a deep breath as the virtual camera angled under him in order to give the illusion that his utterance carried the weight and respect that an utterance of Hammond's would have even though he'd only been around for a couple of years and everybody had kind of wished he were Hammond the whole time anyway. In a stentorian squeak, he said, "Godspeed, SG-1."

Nobody pointed out that he'd ad-libbed the 'SG-1' and that technically it wasn't really SG-1 since O'Neill wasn't on the team anymore, unless his intent was to slight O'Neill or make a left-handed comment about O'Neill's absence the past two and arguably three years. O'Neill's arm came up to fling a jaunty salute toward the control room, or possibly flip it the bird, and when he turned to say something O'Neill-like like "Let's go!" or "Let's do it!," he found that Mitchell had already led the team right up to the wormhole (which was already established when the scene opened but the writer forgot to mention that), and he had to scramble to catch up.

_11:33am aieeeee not enough time_

When they entered the wormhole, they were supposed to experience a vertiginous dislocation as their molecular mass was converted to energy and beamed through the wormhole, because at some point the Stargates had begun to work just like _Star Trek_ transporters only with, you know, wormholes. But this time they felt what Jack and Daniel and Sam had felt the very first times they'd gone through a Stargate wormhole: a freezing, terrifying, dimensionless, _physical_ fall. And instead of stumbling out of a gate on the other side, they found themselves standing in a plain white room, their faces and bodies rimed with frost.

"Wo," said O'Neill.

"What the fuck?" said Mitchell, and threw up.

"Oh my god," Carter said. "We've rematerialized as mass _right in the middle of the wormhole transit_! That's amazing! There must be some failsafe built into the Stargate system to create an environment with gravity and atmosphere to keep us alive while we're in the hyperspace-like conduit of the wormhole. I've got to get back and call Kip Thorne right away!"

"How long do you think we'll be stuck here?" Daniel asked.

"What," said Jack, "you got a date or something?"

"Or something," Daniel said, ignoring the slashy subtext in the glint of warning in Jack's dark, dangerous eyes.

"Well, a wormhole can stay open for only thirty-eight minutes," Carter said. "If we don't get out of here before then, I don't know what will happen. You didn't experience anything like this when you were trapped for those forty-eight hours, did you, Teal'c?"

"If I had I would not tell you," Teal'c said.

"Well, get to work on getting us out of here, Carter," Jack said. "Everybody help her. This should be a team effort."

They all sat down on the plain white floor and thought very hard about how they might be able to get out of here. After a little while, Vala said, "This is boring. The least the makers of the gate system could have done was fashioned an _entertaining_ failsafe environment."

Suddenly they were surrounded by an amusement park. Vala crowed in delight and went off to ride the biggest roller-coaster, dragging Teal'c with her to act as a buffer (you should never go on an old-time roller-coaster by yourself, they bang you around too much).

"Nobody think of any other nice environments!" Mitchell barked in Command Voice. "Obviously this place responds to our thoughts, and if somebody changes the parameters, who knows what'll happen to Vala and Teal'c!"

Suddenly the part of the amusement park to the left of where they were sitting turned into a tropical beach, populated by women and men in skimpy little bikinis carrying drinks in funny-shaped glasses with little umbrellas stuck in them. And fruit garnishes.

"Jack ... " Daniel said warningly to Jack.

"Ur-GO!" Jack shouted to the environment at large, as if that would shift the blame from him even though Urgo had nothing to do with this.

The roller-coaster was perfectly intact and just fine, and they could hear Vala's screeches of delight in the distance. As Daniel and Sam apparently realized that the environment would accommodate _all_ their preferences and incorporate all their happy places into this one place, the open doors to a vast library opened at one end of the beach, and the doors to a high-tech laboratory (with a cello incongruously set on a stand in the middle) opened at the other. Between the beach and the amusement-park rides there was a really cool airplane. Mitchell said "Yeah, belay that last order" and went off to take it for a spin. While Daniel and Carter went off into their respective buildings, Jack sat back comfortably in the sand to sip his tropical drink and watch the bikinis.

Several years passed in subjective time. Carter revised her hypothesis to a year-to-minute correlation, and declared that they now had thirty subjective years to find a way out of this fix. Everybody had sex for a while, and then they started pitching in to help Carter by using the library and laboratory facilities to educate themselves and each other in their respective specialties. Ten years and seventeen doctorates later (Vala got impatient, so she only got two), they all came up with the answer at once: "We'll reverse the polarity of the matter stream and time will go backwards and we'll back out of the gate right back onto the gateramp!"

"But we won't remember what happened, and we'll just fall into the trap all over again," Daniel said. "Plus, not-remembering? Really sucks."

"I shall step outside the light cone and remember for the rest of you," Teal'c said courageously.

"The _light cone_?" Carter said, since light cones had nothing to do with inside-of-a-wormhole physics.

"Ignore him," Jack said, "the writer just thought it sounded cool."

They still had twenty years left of their thirty-eight, and although the writer was running out of time and they actually had the solution to their problem, they decided to stay in the wormhole for the rest of the twenty years, because they were having so much fun and so much great sex. So there was a musical montage, and then they activated the timestream-reversing polarity thing, and backed out of the gate and down the gateramp, all young again except for O'Neill, who wasn't old exactly but still.

"What just happened?" Daniel said.

"Did something happen?" Vala said. "I thought we were waiting for Landry to say 'godspeed.'"

"You know, I have a bad feeling about this," Mitchell said.

"So do I," said O'Neill. "Screw it. We know the coordinates of the system where the Asgard left the fleet. We can be there in thirty-eight minutes on _Odyssey_."


End file.
